Building Smart Communities Through Social Networking

Let’s first look at what is social networking? Social networking is where people develop networks of friends and associates. It forges and creates links between different people. A social network can form a key element of collaborating and networking.

In sequal to the previous posting on how to measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts and what ROI categories to use, we will now look at what type of social networking communities to create to gain advantages from free social networking.

The common types of communities created are:

1. Customer Community
2. Employee Community
3. Partner Community

The goals for creating these types of communities are:

Customer Community goals:

• Better understand customer preferences and profile
• Increase awareness of your brand
• Facilitate sharing of best practices
• Increase adoption of your products and services
• Improve customer loyalty and retention
• Receive real time feedback from customers regarding wants and needs
• Increase persistent traffic to the website
• Solicit customer-driven innovation
• Empower power users and experts to find and fill job positions

Employee Community Goals:

• Create a company culture of sharing and teamwork
• Increase intra-company communication and collaboration
• Improve employee retention and the bond between company and employee
• Discover new ideas and accelerate innovation
• Encourage cross-functional inputs to drive better decision making
• Bolster minority and special interest group programs

Partner Community Goals:

• Enable general communication with partners
• Facilitate sharing of best practices & creation of a knowledge base
• Encourage co-innovation to better serve joint customers and markets
• Increase sales through real-time market intelligence
• Provide a central repository for partner communication
• Enable opinion sharing and recommendations

This is an extract from my Social Media Marketing Report.

If you’re interested in related social media articles, read here and please feel free to leave any comments.